Licensing or Certification of Child-bearing

by Vivien Leitner

Voting, driving, giving legal advice, practicing medicine, hair cutting etc. etc.: all need certification attesting competence, maturity.

Adoptive parents are required to jump through hoops.

Biological parenting is viewed as a right. This is alright for plants and lower animals. For humans, should it not be an earned privilege? Should we not require proof of competence, maturity, economic security before allowing people to beget a child? The marriage license requires proof of age and, in come states, a blood test. Isn't raising a child a much more important undertaking than cohabiting?

The marriage license has obviously lost most of its prestige. Too often it is a license for the egregious display of conspicuous consumption. Could it be retooled to make it relevant again, by applying it to procreation?

Taxpayers are bankrolling the lack of libidinal control of irresponsible individuals, and the children are ultimately left holding the bag in foster home or on streets.

Failing that, we should meaningfully tax each child after the second or third, indexing the tax to inflation.

The Clash Between Reproductive Physiology and Our Culture

by Vivian Leitner

As child bearing is postponed to the late twenties and into the thirties in developed societies, divorce in mid-forties and beyond increases the numbers of still dependent children affected by it. Can their number be reduced and pain lessened?

Obviously, there are a myriad reasons for matrimonial fiasco. Statistics - as reported in the mass media available to all - show the leading cause to be children, money and sex. Incidentally, all the arguments in this discussion are statistical, not white vs. black statements.

Disagreement concerning children are difficult to resolve: no parent will compromise on what he/she believes to be best for the child. Money, one can hope will become less of a problem as more women have satisfying careers.

That leaves sex.

The purpose of this discussion is to stimulate a general conversation about sex in middle age and on.

Our libido is driven by the instinct to preserve the species. Logic would then suggest that when we can no longer have children due to normal biological circumstances, our libido will fall off.

Normal physiological facts are that men can father healthy children till the cows come home, whereas women can no longer have children around age fifty. The incidence of children born with problems starts rising when mothers hit age thirty-seven and increases exponentially in the next three years: one in forty children born to women aged forty have Down's Syndrome.

Studies show that some women - and the female of one other species which I can't remember - 'lose interest in their mates' when they have had the number of children they decided they want.

In divorces that make the news, for every woman who complains that her husband has lost interest in her, there are several men who say the same of their wives.

In middle aged couples, some of these complaints could be due to the fundamental incompatibility between the reproductive psychology of men and women.

Until relatively recently, childbirth created many widowers; wives were much younger than husbands; men died at a much younger age than they do now. All in all there were fewer couples of the same age reaching middle and old age together. So perhaps discrepancy in libido did not develop too often.

Our schools do not teach all 'the facts of life'. Consequently, husbands and wives do not know when they are becoming estranged, accuse each other of sins of omission and commission, real and imaginary; wives condemn their husbands to 'matrimonial celibacy' and paradoxically succeed in pushing them into another woman's arms. The reverse also happens but more rarely.

The end is divorcee and distraught children. There are crime-less victims here.

Our culture is monogamous and this mind-set is strengthened by words such as adultery, betrayal, cheating, infidelity. Yet, by middle age it should be obvious that homo-sapiens are not monogamous, and signing a piece of paper will not suddenly change that till death do us part.

Nonetheless, monogamy seems the best system we have devised to date for having and raising children, to lessen the possibility of inadvertent incest. (Ideally, we would have a legal requirement for each person to have children with just one other in a lifetime, no matter the number of marriages. Pie in the sky)

There is, then, a clash between our biology and our culture. What can be done to prevent husbands from becoming murderous and wives unhinged as a result of this clash, and in the process, reduce the divorce rate?

We cannot change our biology, but we can tweak our culture; for this to happen, we can start by teaching all the facts of human reproductive physiology in Freshman high school; if and when the time comes, it would be natural for couples to separate the purely physical aspect of marriage form affection, companionship, friendship, mutual caring, family life. We should legalize prostitution to lessen the incidence of affairs. In an 'open marriage' like this, furtive behavior would be unnecessary and the added attraction of danger would disappear. And if an affair did develop into love, divorce would be amicable- for the sake of the children and the parents- and everyone would move on.

Honest education is the key.

We have an ancient template for open marriages that we can adapt to our times: "the patriarch, his wife and concubines". Most probably, the wife aged with the patriarch, while there was a parade of ever new concubines of child-bearing age.